Digital Afterlife and Soft Data
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Gábor Dóka
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This ongoing artistic research investigates how photography, surveillance, and material decay intersect, exploring how images transition from tools of representation into agents of power, memory, and entropy. Building on earlier research into Mass Surveillance & Image Power (in dialogue with Matteo Pasquinelli, Harun Farocki, and Trevor Paglen), this project is evolving toward questions about Digital Afterlife & Data Remains, where traces of human activity persist as posthumous presences.
Inspired by Carl Öhman’s concept of digital remains-data that outlives us but relies on fragile infrastructures my practice is experimenting with ways to translate images-memories into perishable, biological matter. By embedding fragments into gelatin derived from animal collagen, I am developing what I term "soft archives": temporary fossils that melt, blur, and dissolve over time.
Through photographic and possibly video documentation of these transformations, I am investigating decay not simply as disappearance, but as a form of remembering through disintegration. The work is still evolving, but it gestures toward a critical aesthetic of impermanence and a posthuman ethics of memory.
